Quotes from Maggie Nelson

How people are often merciless on those they love the most

I was so happy renting in New York City for so long because renting—or at least the way I rented, which involved never lifting a finger to better my surroundings—allows you to let things literally fall apart all around you. Then, when it gets to be too much, you just move on.

I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink-- Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

I feel high on the knowledge that I can talk as much as I want to, as quickly as I want to, in any direction that I want to, without anyone overtly rolling her eyes at me or suggesting I go to speech therapy. I'm not saying this is good pedagogy. I am saying that its pleasures are deep.

psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art.

I have long known about madmen and kings; I have long known about feeling real. I have long been lucky enough to feel real, no matter what diminishments or depressions have come my way. And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.

I know what I want is impossible. If I can make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, like washing a stone over and over again in river water, if I can find the right perch or crevice from which to record everything, if I can give myself enough white space, maybe I could do it. I could tell you this story while walking out of this story. I could—it all could—just disappear.

I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

When I say "hope," I don't mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it's worth it to keep one's eyes open.

But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.

At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel "in progress" rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette.

WHAT IT IS It is what it is. But what is it? What it is— Some soft tautology whose terms are touch Time to give, time to give it up.

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. We ought to, but we don't—or at least, we don't quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won't need to stare as long.

And if 'saturation' means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does 'saturation' not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience?

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.

96. For a prince of blue is a prince of blue because keeps 'a pet sorrow, a blue-devil familiar, that goes with him everywhere' (Lowell, 1870) This is how a prince of blue becomes a pain devil.

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

When all the mythologies have been set aside, we can see that, children or no children, the joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing.

51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, The Encyclopedia says. –Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise?

But if I were honest, or if I were at least to bump into the limits of my honesty, I would have to admit that I knew exactly how this love would end from the moment it began. The loss was probably before it was possible.

Visibility makes possible, but it also disciplines: disciplines gender, disciplines genre.)

The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.